Sermon Tone Analysis

This term, in my doctoral program, we are examining the role culture plays into our spiritual formation and leadership.

We’re examining church culture, in particular, but also how ministries and communities are influenced by their surrounding environment.

We’re looking at how things like race and gender are shaped by culture.

We’re examining how culture around social media and technology form us, shape us.

We’re going to look at how consumer culture impacts churches, communities like ours that are embedded in a capitalistic, consumption based society.

It is fascinating, because we have to recognize that our cultural values impact everything we do and everything we do forms us into certain kinds of people.

We all know that a healthy culture nurtures people and causes them to grow and succeed.

We also know how negative, abusive cultures can cause deep harm — cultures of harm can very much exist in the church.

We know this.

In our text this week and throughout the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is describing the culture of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Nowhere else in the Scriptures will you find a more succinct, focused distillation of the kind of culture Jesus was ushering in through his ministry than the 5, 6, 7th chapters of Matthew.

The Sermon on the Mount is about the culture of God’s way.

Alright, with that said, let’s take a minute to talk about culture with each other.

Culture

What is a Culture?

How would you define a community or organization’s culture?

Turn and talk

What is the stated and implied culture of Bellingham?

What is the stated and implied culture of St. James Presbyterian Church?

Sharing: What did you learn together?

What are the cultural values you named for Bellingham?

What about the cultural values you shared for our church?

Culture is not benign.

Cultures aren’t neutral, they actually value some things more than others and emphasize certain behaviors and practices over and above others.

And so we see with Jesus’ opening word in the Sermon on the Mount, God’s people have a culture and set of values that they are formed around:

Matthew 5:1–12 (NRSV)

1 When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. 2 Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

5 “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

7 “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

8 “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

9 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

10 “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

11 “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Jesus, as we recall, has just called the first disciples, Peter, Andrew, James, and John, along the shoreline of Capernaum and now, he sits down with them and others to lay out this picture of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Where the world has defined certain parameters or values that these people were formed by, now Jesus invites them to hear of a different way.

Jesus calls blessed the poor in spirit, those who mourn, those who are meek, those who long suffer in the cause of righteousness, those who are merciful, those who are pure in heart, the peacemakers, those who are persecuted for doing the right thing, and those who are outcast because of belonging to this alternative culture, the Jesus way.

We could spend ages on each of these themes, unpacking what it means to be poor in spirit or hunger for righteousness — but as you zoom out and hear this, don’t you hear the kind of culture Jesus is sharing?

It is a culture that is very honest about the struggles of life on earth.

It is a culture that affirms our longing for liberation and the liberation of others.

Many have remarked that this section of the Gospels is where we most seriously see Jesus’ democratic and socialist leanings — this an entirely different kind of cultural value than what the Roman occupiers had in mind.

And we have to wrestle with being implicated by this view that Jesus is offering: is our Christian culture in line with these values?

I know many of us wrestle with how Christians occupy the broader culture in the United States.

I struggle when I see the hatred and denial of this culture come out from so many who also want to say they align with the name of Jesus.

What we have here is the blueprint for the way God’s people are called to order their lives: All around these “blessed.”

You want to find that blessed life?

It begins with this list of unexpected and culturally backwards teachings.

To be poor is to be great.

To bring peace is to be God’s children.

I mentioned that my Doctoral coursework is focusing on culture.

But I also have found myself thinking about culture this week in light of the news of more gun violence around our nation and the conversation around race and policing following the brutal beating and death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis this month.

One of the pieces that has struck me this week regarding this violence against a black man, yet again at the hands of police, is that the conversation has risen to an acknowledgement of a system of racism in modern policing that, even though the officers who beat Nichols were black, they belong to a system that in many ways values white supremacy and power.

It is also fascinating and heartbreaking that the justice in this case has been swift to charge these 5 police officers, who are black, with murder, while other situations with black victims and white officers, have not had such a quick and hard response.

People called for justice for George Floyd and Breona Taylor for months, years, before anything substantial was done.

Black officers in a system and culture that consistently does not value black people.

Now, let’s remember, culture itself is benign — it can be good, it can be bad, but regardless, it exists.

What we must acknowledge, then, is what kind of culture we participate in and perpetuate.

So, we have the way of Jesus — the blesseds.

Quick aside, I always have to say this when I preach on this passage.

My son’s name is Asher, which is a Hebrew word that translates to blessed or happy.

When the Greek scribes went through and translated the Hebrew Bible into what is called the Septuigent (a greek Old Testament, if you will), they used the same Greek word here, makarios, to translate the word Asher from the Old Testament writings.

They’re a Greek and Hebrew pair, makarios and asher.

Just so you know.

Alright, let’s close with this potentially difficult examination: We’ve already talked a bit about what the culture we have at St. James is like.

But let’s look in the mirror: Does what we say we value align with what Jesus is teaching his disciples to value and focus on?

Do we actually live those values out, values like inclusion, welcome, passion for justice that actually gets work done?

Or do we provide lip service?

We fly a couple of flags at the front of the narthex and on our church tower.

The American flag and Christian flag and Bellingham flag all stand and remind us of our allegiances.

We display the Black Lives Matter flag in the window, showing that we stand with black folks and want to extend our welcome to them.

In the same way, we fly the Pride flag from out St. James sign outside, making our community aware of our inclusion of all people, LGBTQIA+ and otherwise.

But do we actually do these things?

Take a clear look in the mirror: Do you live out these values?

Do we truly make them a priority?

And this is not to make us feel bad (or good about ourselves, for that matter).

It is to ask us to confront our material values and see if they actually line up with the way of Jesus.

Do we show mercy?

Do we stand up to criticism of the Good News with peacemaking, loving attitudes?

The challenge for us today is to really attend to what our culture is, both here in our church life, and also in our workplaces, our families, our homes.

Review some of the stated values from earlier — do any align?

Closing

Jesus is inviting us to a transformative, radically different culture.

Our practice and work together here is to align ourselves to that culture and let it guide everything else we do.

Are we living that blessed life?

Are we faking it?

Are we discovering it and embracing it?

Rejoice and be glad, my friends, for your reward is great in heaven.

May it be so among us.